James Meek - Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else

Also by James Meek

NOVELS

McFarlane Boils the Sea
Drivetime
The Peoples Act of Love
We Are Now Beginning Our Descent
The Heart Broke In

SHORT STORIES

Last Orders and Other Stories
The Museum of Doubt

First published by Verso 2014
James Meek 2014

Earlier versions of the following chapters originally appeared in the
London Review of Books: Chapter 1 in vol. 33, no. 9; Chapter 3 in vol. 30, no. 15; Chapter 4 in vol. 34, no. 17; Chapter 5 in vol. 33, no. 18; Chapter 6 in vol. 36, no. 1. An earlier version of Chapter 2 appeared in the Guardian under the headline The 10bn Rail Crash

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-290-6
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-695-9 (UK)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-291-3 (US)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meek, James, 1962
Private island : why Britain now belongs to someone else / James Meek. First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-78168-290-6 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-78168-291-3 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-78168-291-3
1. PrivatizationGreat Britain. 2. Great BritainEconomic conditions21st century. 3. Great BritainSocial conditions21st century. I. Title.
HD4145.M44 2014
338.94105dc23

2014012255

v3.1

This book is dedicated to Sophy, and to the
memory of Chris Geering, master builder.

One winters morning in 1991 I loaded a guitar, a condensed edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and a Teach Yourself Russian course into an old Volkswagen, left the house near Edinburgh where Id been staying and drove to Kiev. Five days passed on the road. I left the familiarity, order and prosperity of Britain, the island where Id grown up, and travelled east to wait for the Soviet Union to dissolve. I didnt have to wait long. A few weeks after I arrived, it ceased to be. Russia and Ukraine went their separate ways. The Kiev traffic policeman waving down my foreign-plated car had time to utter the words, What are you doing in the Soviet Union? before the colour left his face, his mouth went dry, and he turned away, lost, a bully orphaned of his corporate father. A seventy-year experiment to test whether the ethos of the commune could be imposed on a transcontinental empire of hundreds of millions of people was over, long after the answer was in (it couldnt). I wasnt sorry to see Soviet communism go. Despite all thats happened since, I still dont mourn it. There was hope in the beginning that something fine would grow in the gap that was left. It was a while before I realised the cynical, grasping figures who moved in to take possession of the ruins were not, as Id hoped, transitional symptoms of change, but the essence of that change.

This book about Britain started there, in Ukraine and Russia. Watching the vultures come to feast on the carcass of the worlds largest state-owned, planned economy, I began to find the terms to question what had been done by politicians, economic theorists, lobbyists and business people in my own country. I had thought, when I left Scotland, in the unconscious way certainties are stowed in ones mind, that I knew Britain; that some essential way of being would be resilient to Margaret Thatchers rearrangements, which must, as transient policies, be superficial. I had to go home by way of Kiev and Moscow to see that I was wrong, to begin to see how, and how deeply, she and her followers altered Britain.

With hindsight, 1991 was a pivotal year. When it began, the free market economic belief system, with its lead proselytisers Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, had been pushing back for more than a decade against various attempts to impose levelling communitarianism around the world. The Berlin Wall had fallen, as had communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. The market belief system, which holds that government is incompetent by default, that state taxation is oppressive, that the desire for wealth is the right and principal motivator of achievement and that virtually all human wants can best be met by competing private firms, was becoming entrenched in the non-communist world, from Chile to New Zealand. Made bold by a popular public perception that government overspending and selfish organised labour was to blame for economic stagnation and high inflation in the 1970s, Thatcher and Reagan had taken on powerful trades unions, and won. Barriers to the international movement of goods and money had fallen; the European Union was, on paper, a single marketplace. In Britain, restrictions on how much ordinary people could borrow to finance their everyday needs had been scrapped, and millions had acquired credit cards. Volumes of regulations controlling how banks were allowed to use peoples deposits had been torn up, and unimaginably vast sums were

But at the end of 1990, the triumph of marketism seemed to hang in the balance. Reagan and Thatcher had relinquished the stage to less fervent, less charismatic successors. The man whod introduced the market economy to China, Deng Xiaoping, had been blamed by traditional communists for fostering the Tiananmen Square protests, and was in disgrace. In the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, the great hope of free marketeers, was facing a similar backlash from hardliners, and the Baltic countries hopes of escape from the USSR looked bleak. Saddam Hussein, dictator of semi-socialist Iraq, had invaded semi-capitalist Kuwait.

Yet the following year conviction began to grow among the marketeers that the final defeat of centrally planned, communitarian government was at hand, the sense that seemed to confirm such ideas as America having won the Cold War, and the end of history. Early in 1991 it became clear that the Soviet leadership had lost the necessary unanimity and ruthlessness to keep Lithuania within the USSR. The humiliating collapse of the coup against Gorbachev that summer presaged recognition of Baltic independence, Ukraines vote to go the same way, and the end of the Soviet Union. In Kuwait at the beginning of the year I saw experienced British war correspondents squabble for reporting billets among the frontline troops with the ferocity of those who believe something is being offered for the last time; we thought British and American armies might never fight another war. Few doubted Saddam would be beaten, and he was. That November, as I drove off the ferry at Ostend, heading east, it seemed a racing, expanding tide of victorious free marketism flickered at my wheels, a tide that has gone by many names consumer capitalism, Reaganism, Thatcherism, neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus. Though the watchtowers still stood at the old border between two Germanys, the border was gone. In eastern Germany, the narrow cobbled streets of medieval towns had jammed solid with second hand cars. I passed a field where an impatient western German DIY chain, unwilling to wait for steel and breeze blocks, had erected a vast, circular retail marquee, blazing with lights. The canvas superstore seemed to have landed, like a spacecraft from a flashier civilisation, come down to offer shrink-wrapped packs of rawl plugs and a choice of bathroom fittings. In Poland, I got lost in fog near Wroclaw, and saw how small shops had sprung up everywhere, even in the tiniest villages. In the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, in damp, coal-scented murk so thick I wasnt sure which way my car was pointing, I came across an entrepreneur hawking coffee from a roadside kiosk; the best coffee I ever tasted. He was like a champion of Thatcherite values, the small businessman standing ready to serve at all hours, in all weathers, making up for lost time under communism, silently mocking the market-questioning scepticisms Id brought with me from Scotland. Then I crossed the border into Ukraine, where the USSR had a month left to run.